SpiritRaft.comhttp://spiritraft.com
Test Your SpiritSat, 19 May 2018 01:49:09 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.6http://spiritraft.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/cropped-gravatar-32x32.pngSpiritRaft.comhttp://spiritraft.com
32324. Playing with Knowledgehttp://spiritraft.com/stages-of-learning/applying-knowledge/
Fri, 03 Feb 2017 23:57:13 +0000http://academy.spiritraft.com/?p=173The question “Why are we learning this?” is not a rare one in most teachers’ classrooms. We might find it arising less frequently in the future if we make “playing with knowledge” a higher priority in our instructional efforts.

Think about the last thing you learned “for yourself,” meaning not a work-related or formal school objective. Maybe it was cooking, or a new hobby, or something else. Chances are, you immersed yourself in doing this new activity, read lots about it (including Wikipedia), watched YouTube videos, maybe had some mentors or friends who you consulted as experts. It may not have felt like “learning” but in reality it probably was. This is because of the playful approach to it, “This is something fun that I enjoy and want to get better at.”

In his TED talks, Tony Wagner talks about the role of play as a stepping stone to passion, and then purpose. By fostering engagement through play, young people eventually discover a true passion, which can then turn to purpose.

Play can also foster pathways for young people to safely explore risks and taking chances. In an inspiring article about a different kind of playground in England where kids build forts with old wood and metal, light their own fires, and generally play with limited adult supervision. The Atlantic draws some powerful research together about what kids can learn by taking risks. The research points to deep social-emotional growth (aka the “soft skills” that are in demand by companies and lamented as being absent from high school graduates). Interestingly, some schools like Gulliver Tulley’s Tinkering School advocate for letting little kids use power tools and play with fire.

Lastly, part of play as an educational tool, is in blurring the lines between imagination, reality and experiencing new things. Play doesn’t always have to look exactly like recess. In fact daydreaming is another method that is encouraged to allow for deep neurological connections to be made and for ideas and information to be processed. Neuroscience research, highlighted in a recent New Yorker article points to the importance of allowing kids brains to be able to wander and process what they have observed, seen, and done during the course of a day.

It is import to take knowledge out from an educational setting and making it work beyond that setting. It is exophoric. Playing is about as real as education gets, albeit not as endemically real as the unconscious applications that are of the lifeworld itself. Playing with knowledge can occur in two ways:

Playing Appropriately

means knowledge is acted upon or realised in a predictable or typical way in a specific context. Such action could be taken to meet normal expectations in a particular situation, for instance: objects are used in the way they are supposed to be, or meanings are represented in a way which conforms to the generic conventions of a semiotic or meaning-making setting. Never does Playing Appropriately involve exact replication or precise reproduction. It always involves some measure of transformation, reinventing or revoicing the world in a way which, ever-so-subtly perhaps, has never occurred before. Playing Appropriately entails the application of knowledge and understandings to the complex diversity of real world situations and testing their validity. By these means, learners do something in a predictable and expected way in a ‘real world’ situation or a situation that simulates the ‘real world’. This brings learners back to the world of experienced, but a world into which they have transferred understandings developed in other Knowledge Processes.

Playing Creatively

means knowledge and capabilities is taken from one setting and adapted to quite a different setting—a place far from the one from which that knowledge or capabilities originated, and perhaps a setting unfamiliar to the learner. In this process, learners take an aspect of knowledge or meaning out of its familiar context and make it work—differently perhaps—somewhere else. This kind of transformation may result in imaginative originality, creative divergence or hybrid recombinations and juxtapositions which generate novel meanings and situations. Playing Creatively involves making an intervention in the world which is truly innovative and creative and which brings to bear the learner’s interests, experiences and aspirations. This is a process of making the world anew with fresh and creative forms of action and perception. Now learners do something that expresses or affects the world in new way, or transfers their newly acquired knowledge into a new setting.

Many students equate ‘to know’ with ‘to understand’. However, ‘knowing’ something is not the same as ‘understanding’ something. Worst still, students may take knowing the ‘definition’ of a term as understanding the ‘concept’ of the term, both of which are actually quite different.

Governed by the ‘learning as knowing’ metaphor, many students regard the teacher as a dispenser of information and themselves as the receiver of information. They aim to increase the amount of knowledge that they possess. They believe that learning outcomes can be evaluated by measuring the amount of knowledge acquired.

However, learning involves getting the ‘meaning’ of the knowledge. Meaning is generated by the interplay between new information and existing concepts in the students’ mind. Without existing concepts, information can have no meaning. Learning is achieved through students selecting relevant information and interpreting it through their existing knowledge. As Resnick (1989) aptly noted, “learning occurs not by recording information but by interpreting it”. Hence, students are not recipients of knowledge but constructors of knowledge. How the student structures and processes knowledge is much more important than how much is learned. Structuring and processing knowledge means that students must ‘select’, ‘organise’ and ‘integrate’ new information with prior knowledge in their mind. To do so, each student must acquire metacognitive (reflective) skills
for controlling his/her cognitive (thinking) process during learning.

So, how do you understand something? To understand is ‘to comprehend’, and to comprehend is ‘to take in’ or embrace. Seeing solitary facts in relation to a general principle is the essence of understanding. What is an understanding then? An understanding is a generalised meaning or insight. An insight is a basic sense of, or feeling for, relationships; it is a meaning or discernment. A tested generalised insight is an understanding; it is a meaning or discernment that one may profitably apply to several or even many similar, but not necessarily identical, situations or processes. The most valuable insights are those confirmed by enough similar cases to be generalised into an understanding. A student understands any object, process, ideas or fact if he/she sees how it can be used to fulfil some purpose or goal. The outcomes of a collection of understandings are generalisations, theories, generalised insights, general ideas, concepts, principles, rules and/or laws.

How do you achieve understanding? Well, ‘how’ you approach learning (strategy) depends on ‘why’ you want to learn it in the first place (motive) (Biggs, 1987). If your desire to learn springs from the urge to gain a paper qualification with minimal trouble or effort, it is likely that you will focus on what appears to be the most important topics (as defined by examinations) and reproduce them. Because of this focus, you will not see interconnections between elements or the meanings and implications of what is learned. However, if your motive to learn is based on curiosity, you will adopt a strategy to seek meaning. There is a personal commitment to learning, which means that you will relate the content to personally meaningful contexts or to existing prior knowledge, depending on the subject concerned. You will search for analogies, relate to previous knowledge, theorise about what is learned, and derive extensions and exceptions.

Absorbing information can be the most difficult part in the journey of knowledge. Uploading information as an indexed catalog in our brain is no easy task. It takes a strong will to do it. While there’s no set rule for how much information people can store in their brain, their is a lot of speculation that this information is difficult to go in and is even more difficult to stay for long periods of time. Here’s how we can upload this information in our brain effectively with durability.

First: Memorize Effectively

Use spaced repetition. If you want to remember something, don’t repeat it over and over to yourself – this is known as massed repetition. Instead, let some time elapse before you repeat it. Ideally, you want to try to retrieve the information exactly at the moment when you were about to forget it. The difficulty of retrieving the information correlates to how strongly you will remember it.

If you’ve just met someone and want to remember their name, repeat it to yourself every five or ten seconds while talking to them.

When studying, don’t go over the same flashcards over and over again. Let a few hours or even a day go by, then go through them again. You can stop studying the ones that are easy to remember. Focus on repeated the ones that are difficult, but always allowing some time to elapse in between sessions.

Quiz yourself. Taking a short test helps to keep information you’ve just learned in your mind. The process of retrieving the information from your brain seems to strengthen your mental connection to it, making it easier to remember that information over the long term

When reading, stop every so often – perhaps after every chapter or section, or more often it’s very difficult reading. Put down the reading and ask yourself: can I summarize what I have just read in one or two sentences?

After a lecture, class, or important meeting, jot down the main take-away points in your own words. Don’t look back at your notes: see what you can remember.

Take notes long-hand. Even if you only use your laptop for note-taking, and stay away from distractions like e-mail or social media, typing is still less effective than hand writing your notes. Writing by hand is slower and forces you to put the teacher’s words into your own words. This is the first step toward understanding and retaining knowledge, rather than merely recording it.

Explain your knowledge to someone else. Teaching the knowledge you need to retain to a friend, roommate, or family member forces you to translate the information into clear, understandable language. This is an important activity in “active learning,” which has been shown to improve retention and understanding of knowledge.

Spend two minutes explaining a concept to your roommate. Then, swap roles, and let your roommate explain a concept to you for two minutes.

Grab a whiteboard and teach a five-minute lesson to a friend. Then, ask your friend to explain what you’ve just taught them. Pay attention to what confused them: the areas that you explain least clearly are probably the things you understand least well.

Write a letter to a parent or other relative. Explain the concept in clear, simple terms.

Take breaks when studying. You need to allow time for mental recovery and for the information you’re learning to be absorbed. Even while you’re on your break, your mind will be turning over the new information, and you might find yourself better able to understand a problem when you return to it.

Second: Create Connections

Link your knowledge to larger concepts. It’s much easier to remember facts if you understand why those facts are true. Ask yourself, or your teacher: why do things work the way they do? If you understand the larger conceptual framework, you will be able to retrieve knowledge more easily and even guess more accurately.

For example, if you have to memorize geographical borders, think about how those borders were formed. Notice that in many places, borders follow natural features such as rivers and mountain ranges. By observing a general rule like this you save yourself from having to memorize each individual border; instead, you can remember which borders follow this rule.

Connect facts to ideas. You are more likely to remember something if you can associate it with other, related things. Tell a story to yourself about a particular fact: even if your story is light-hearted, it will cement the fact in your mind.

This is sometimes call the Baker/baker paradox. Shown a picture of a woman, people are much more likely to remember that she is a baker than that her name is Baker. This is because the idea of being a baker has more associations. It conjures up thoughts of bread and might suggest links with the image: perhaps her face looks doughy, for example.

Evaluate your own learning process. Assess yourself by asking whether you are absorbing new material and whether you understand the big concepts that underlie that material. Reflect on what aspects of the learning process have worked for you and what aspects were less helpful. This kind of self-evaluation is known as metacognition, and it has been shown to improve your ability to transfer what you’ve learned to new settings and situations.

Opt for the final project. Sometimes you are allowed to choose between taking a final exam or completing a final project. In other cases, you might have the choice to take a class that assigns a project. Where possible, choose the final project. Completing a complex project related to the knowledge area is associated with greater retention of knowledge than taking a test alone.

Don’t focus on just one thing for too long. Instead, turn from one task to another, and intersperse studying one subject with studying something else. Look for connections between the different topics. Seeing how knowledge fits together into a larger picture will help you to understand its significance and remember it better.

Present the information in different ways. By learning the same material in different modes, you will increase your ability to remember it. Regardless of preferences, everyone can benefit from learning the same information visually, aurally, textually, and so on.

Many people feel or have been told that they are more of a “visual learner,” an “auditory learner,” and so on. There’s no evidence to suggest, though, that learning mainly in your preferred mode is advantageous. Instead, it’s helpful to learn in as many different modes as possible.

Make up a little song about the information. Music accesses different parts of the brain, and the ability to remember music seems to have evolved earlier than the ability to process language. Singing about your topic helps you store that information in a different part of your brain.

If you’re studying a foreign language, learn a familiar children’s song in that language to solidify vocabulary. For example, “Heads, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” will help you memorize that language’s words for major body parts.

You probably learned to count partly through nursery rhymes such as “Five Green and Speckled Frogs.” Make up similar silly songs about concepts in trigonometry or calculus – it still works!

Share your song with your study group. Singing in a group has profound benefits for your brain.

Create a mental image related to the information. This method builds on the importance of creating mental associations with an idea in order to remember it. A short scenario or picture in your mind will create a richer set of associations and allow you to remember abstract ideas more concretely.

Memorize the difference between the mathematical concepts of “zero slope” and “no slope” by picturing a skier. When the skier gets to a vertical cliff, she will scream, “No slope!”

Draw a concept map. This is a visual representation of a set of related ideas. Use words and drawings as well as arrows to indicate relationships.

Concept maps can be very helpful in representing and remembering hierarchical relationships. However, they can also foster creativity, because it’s possible to visualize relationships in many dimensions instead of along one single line.

The flow chart is one kind of concept map. It represents a procedure or decision-making process, representing steps in symbols and connecting those steps using arrows.

Use mnemonics. These are devices to aid memory, often using poems, sayings, or initials. They should be catchy, funny, and easy to repeat. For example, the order of the planets can be remembered using the phrase “My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nachos” (Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Uranus, Neptune).

References
http://www.wikihow.com/Retain-Knowledge

]]>1. Thirst of Knowledgehttp://spiritraft.com/stages-of-learning/thirst-of-knowledge/
Fri, 03 Feb 2017 21:09:08 +0000http://academy.spiritraft.com/?p=123The desire for knowledge can be traced in all living beings, in the lower creation as well as in mankind. If one notices the movements of the birds and animals in the forest, one sees that besides their seeking for their food, their playing with their mates, their protecting themselves from their enemy, they are also interested in every sensation that comes to them through their five senses. Sound, color, touch, scent, every sensation has an effect upon them. One can trace in the animals the natural desire to know something, and it is this tendency which in human evolution can be recognized as curiosity. From childhood this tendency seems predominant, and the more a child shows this tendency the more promising the child is, because that shows that so much more the soul part of the child is to the fore. Among grown-up persons what strikes us most in their personality is that brilliance of intelligence, apart from all their goodness and virtue. If this is such an important thing in life, it must have as a result a most important achievement. And what is that achievement ? This achievement is the knowledge of the ultimate truth, which fulfills the purpose of life.

A curious soul begins by trying to know everything that it sees, that it comes in contact with. What it wants to know first is the name of an object, what it is called, what it is for, what it is, what it is used for, how it is made, how to make the best of a thing, how to profit by it to the utmost. This knowledge is what we call learning. The different divisions of learning, called by different names, are the classification of this knowledge which one gains by study of the outside world. But life is so short and the field of this knowledge is so vast that a person may go on and on studying. He may perhaps study one branch of knowledge, and he may find that one life is not sufficient even to be fully acquainted with that one particular branch of knowledge. And there is another person; he is not satisfied with only touching one branch of knowledge, he wants to touch many branches of knowledge. He may become acquainted to a certain degree with different aspects of knowledge. It may perhaps make him, if he reaches somewhere, what may be called an all-round man. Yet that is not the thing which will suffice the purpose of his life. Al-Farabi, the great Arabian scientist in ancient times, claimed that he knew many sides of knowledge, but when it came to showing his equipment in the knowledge of music, he proved to be lacking in that essential part, which was not the theory of music but the practice of music itself.

Knowledge can be divided into two aspects: one aspect is the knowledge which we call learning, the other aspect is knowing. Learning comes from the reason “it is so, because it is so”. That is knowledge. But there is a knowing which cannot be explained as “because”. It can only be said, “It is so, it cannot be anything else”. The knowledge with its “because” attached is contradicted a thousand times over. One scientist, one inventor, one learned person has one argument; another comes and he says, “This is not what I think. I have found out the truth about it, which the one who saw it before did not perceive rightly”. It has always been and will always be so with the outer knowledge. But with that knowing which is the essential knowledge there has never been a difference and there will never be. The prophets of all ages, in whatever part of the world they were born, when they have touched this realm of knowing, have all agreed on this same thing. That the God is one, and that one day we shall all return to him for a judgement. It is therefore that they called it truth (‘Haq’). It was not because this was the conception of one person or the speculation of another person or the doctrine of a certain professor or the teaching of a certain religion. No, it was the knowledge of every knowing soul. And every soul, whether in the past, present or future, whenever it arrives at that stage where it knows, will realize the same thing. Therefore, it is in that knowledge that there is to be found the satisfaction of the purpose of one’s coming on the earth. Knowledge gives sight. It shows us that which we could not see before. Knowledge is power, and a knowledgeable person is powerful.

]]>Point Of Salehttp://spiritraft.com/services/point-of-sale/
http://spiritraft.com/services/point-of-sale/#respondMon, 26 Dec 2016 10:19:09 +0000http://spiritraft.com/?p=54488POS systems are the future of entire retail industry. Our team understand the needs of businesses in this market.

We believe in developing Point Of Sales applications that are cost-effective and can help our clients in ensuring high level of engagement with their end users. A high quality Point Of Sales system provides a friendly and efficient sales experience for both the cashier and customer. Our team understands the needs of businesses in this market and can ensure a high degree of satisfaction.

Armed with latest and most cutting-edge technology our developers are proficient in creating successful solutions specific to the individual client’s need. Our skilled professionals have helped several clients in minimizing overall costs, automate business processes, and improve customer experience.

Solution Development Process:

Design Conception: We thoroughly analyze the needs of our clients. After gathering the requisites, the design of the application is finalized. This design includes component such as: transaction gateways, security, products catalogue, data storage, payment specifications, demographics, languages, reports, success criteria, and much more.

System Design: once the criteria are finalized, system specifications are released with our skilled developers. Deliverables are created, shared and reviewed with client. With their feedbacks, a detailed system design is released with diagrams and mock-ups..

Application Development: Overall development of the hardware as well as the software starts here. In this phase programmers write the software and then implement it for checking functionality and finding out bugs if any.

QA: Meticulous user acceptance testing is carried out. There are several use-case scenarios that act as medium of testing the product. Only after qualifying the QA testing, the system design is defined valid.

Deployment: Our clients receive our complete support. Once the program is deployed we will ensure that it is running effectively. We can provide extended support for any post-deployment bugs or queries.

We design and develop high quality and functional Enterprise resource planning solutions for our esteemed clients so that they can manage their businesses properly by automating numerous work processes. The ERP solution or management software that we create are a blend of various functions such as planning, manufacturing, development, testing, quality assurance, marketing and sales. The products that we develop are highly customized and industry specific.

Our developers design custom solutions that meets the requisites of our invididual clients accourding to their specific business processes.

The same design principles apply when we create a bespoke design for WordPress.

If you need to edit and update content via a reliable content management system, WordPress is for you. You can have a custom designed, completely unique WordPress site to showcase your brand. I’ve built lots of different WordPress sites with a ton of functionality. we choose it for my clients because it is the most versatile and best supported open-source CMS platform available.

The popularity of WordPress is quite simply down to versatility and ease of use. You don’t need to be a technical expert to add and edit copy, images or even video. The WordPress platform works for just about any type of website that you can think of from a simple 3 page brochure site to a full blown online store with 100s of products. Other usage examples include classified ads, business listings, portfolios, photography, online booking & hotel sites and events registration. If blogging is your thing you can easily integrate with your favourite social media channels.

Lots of features and extensions allow you to adapt your website to meet the needs of your visitors, be that now or in the future. You are safe too, WordPress has a massive community of developers to support it.

WordPress has grown to be the largest content management system in the world and the most popular open source CMS platform today; used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people. Many large organisations use WordPress including CNN, NASA, BBC. Samsung, Nokia and Yahoo.

Next we need to consider all devices and browsers. Adapting for mobile devices gives your users the best experience. Google reports on its blog that 61% of visitors leave a website it if is not mobile ready and deems responsive web design to be best practice.

The main thing is that you deliver the same content via mobile as you do via desktop. Making sure your content is available to users however and wherever they access your site. It needs to load quickly too, these visitors are on the move and need information immediately.

With Responsive Design we target our website designs at device types and screen sizes. It’s a bit like pouring liquid into a glass, adapting to fit the container. Here is a basic example showing a smart phone, tablet and desktop scenario. You can see how the columns adapt their size to better suit the device.

That is a pretty simplistic description and there are lots of technical things that need to be done too, for example, menus need to be adapted to be usable on mobile, buttons must be easy to use with enough finger space around them and we must ensure that we don’t implement functionality that doesn’t work well on touch screens.

We talk about eCommerce separately because it is specialist stuff. Here you will get an eCommerce website that creates a showcase for your products, makes it easy for your customer to buy and is extremely easy to manage. In the end all you want to do is generate sales and grow your business – success!

eCommerce websites are very different because they need to drive the visitor at ever stage to ultimately make their purchase without any hurdles. They also need to be search engine friendly, so that when your potential customer searches for a product, your website comes up in the search results. As a rule visitors don’t tend to search for online stores by name, they tend to go looking for products by keyword search.

Check-out processes need to be simple and streamlined, there cannot be any barriers when converting a sale. Even better if checkout and all of the security that goes with it can be handled by a third party like PayPal, or by an external credit card handler such as Sagepay or Worldpay.

Then you need to make sure you comply with the EU consumer rights directive. Not doing so can be costly. Your web designer needs to be up to date with that and make sure the website complies. It’s important, we use a check-list to make sure we don’t miss anything.

Getting a great design goes without saying, your product display must be stunning to get that vital next click. When a visitor arrives to view the product detail they need to see a good description space, details of other products they might like and a clear “buy” button. Social media sharing is a must these days and online stores are amongst the most shared sites on the web.